Dedicated Librarian Wants Town To Turn Over A New Leaf

November 14, 1987|By Andrew H. Malcolm, New York Times News Service.

ELLISVILLE, ILL. — For 59 of her 60 years, Helen Myers has loved books. First, her mother would read to her. Then the little girl began paging through books herself. Finally she began reading them, aloud and then silently.

Myers loves books so much that she founded a library, the Ellisville Public Library, which struggles to survive here like a lonely wildflower in a crowded cornfield.

The library has one room and a dedicated staff of one: Myers. For the last 22 years Myers has regularly trooped the four blocks from her house down to Main Street in this prairie community hard by the Spoon River. There sits her laboriously collected array of old and less-old volumes, more than 2,000 of them lined up on handmade shelves and in old cardboard cartons just waiting in case one of the struggling town`s residents is moved to read.

Earning a living is a physical activity in these rural communities. So sitting around, even reading, is not a trait that has earned widespread admiration over the years. Officially, Myers` library is open one day a week, every Saturday morning from 9 until 11.

Unofficially, everyone knows the librarian`s home phone number where a call at almost any hour will bring Myers running. Some weeks she may have as many as five customers-``a real good crowd,`` she says.

But running a library single-handedly in a crumbling Midwestern community is not easy these days when mere economic survival is a victory. For one thing, there are fewer people living here, what with the simultaneous declines in area farming, mining and manufacturing. Ellisville used to have 400 potential readers; now there are 140, actually 135 since the Mahr family just left.

There is more competition for free time, namely television. ``It`s much harder for kids to read now,`` she says. ``It`s so much easier just to push a button and let the TV do their thinking. It`s true. If you read, you tend to do your own thinking. I try to tell parents-carefully, you know-they ought to limit their kids` TV. But they use it as a babysitter. That`s the way the world`s going.``

To help increase library patronage she has suspended the penny-a-day penalty for late returns. She has come up with a new idea: a reading hour for children.

She`s put signs in the library window and at the post office. And when no one comes by for the reading hour, Myers tries to round up a few listeners with some phone calls. ``I know I`m competing with the Saturday cartoon shows,`` she says, ``but I`m going to read old standards like `Black Beauty`

and, oh, of course, `Treasure Island.` Just like my mother. I figure if in all these years I get just one person to read a book, my time`s not wasted.``